Posts Tagged ‘mental illness’

It would be so much easier to explain the inexplicable if Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock had been a convert to the Islamic State.

After all, mass shootings in the name of radical Islam are a familiar phenomena. Then all the meticulous planning he put into his spree would be easy to explain as the usual modus operandi of Islamic terrorism.

Tiny problem: Right now there’s no hard evidence to support that theory. “As of now, Paddock appears to be more and more like a Jared Loughner, someone with severe mental problems who acted without political motive.”

Law enforcement officials increasingly believe Stephen Paddock, the gunman who killed and wounded concertgoers from a perch in a high-rise casino hotel last Sunday, had severe mental illness, ABC News reports.

Sources told ABC News that Paddock has been described in hundreds of interviews as standoff-sh, disconnected, and having difficulty establishing and maintaining meaningful relationships.

Authorities have still not found a definitive motive for the massacre.

“We still do not have a clear motive or reason why,” a frustrated Clark County Undersheriff Kevin McMahill said Friday. “We have looked at literally everything.”

Investigators have chased 1,000 leads and examined Paddock’s politics, his finances, any possible radicalization and his social behavior – typical investigative avenues that have helped uncover the motive in past shootings.

A bit more information on the Hsoi/John Daub self-defense shooting of autistic home invader Jared James has come to light that wasn’t in my original story.

The original news reports said things like James “forced his way onto the threshold of one of the homes.” What they actual meant was he battered at the door so hard he broke the frame:

Also, new information shows that the late Mr. James was not quite the “gentle giant” some reports tried to paint:

This fall, for reasons that she [the mother] didn’t understand, [Catalina] Leverette [the mother] said her son had developed a tendency toward unpredictable outbursts, at times running through the house yelling. She knew the police had responded to calls about her son, and newly obtained police reports show two calls in 2014 for an “emotionally disturbed person” involving James.

Also this:

“On Dec. 11, [police] took James to a psychiatric hospital under court order.”

The James shooting was a tragedy, all right, but it was a tragedy of the health system not being able to get a mentally ill man the type help he obviously needed.